Author: Sheila Squillante

[REVIEW] The Volta Book of Poets, edited by Joshua Maria Wilkinson

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volta

Sidebrow Books

367 pages, $25

 

Review by Laura Kochman

 

In the year we have defined as 2015, I am reading and reviewing The Volta Book of Poets. It has emerged from The Volta, a website of/for/about/from contemporary poetry, named after the term for the place where a poem shifts. The Volta’s creator and the editor of this anthology, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, writes in his introduction about the thinking behind this collection—what it means to collect a group of work in one place, in this case a “constellation” that “embrace[s] that cacophony.” It’s clear from his introduction that The Volta Book of Poets seeks to present not a closed list of must-reads, but a field of work that, like language and identity, is ever-expanding.

What does it mean to anthologize? What does it mean to collect, and can one participate in collection without also creating a measurable total or an endpoint? This is Wilkinson’s implied question, and one that the writers in this anthology seem to be thinking through as well. For one thing, this is The Volta Book of Poets, not The Volta Book of Poems. This title is our entry, and so we begin with an act of resistance against definition. It is as difficult to define a mode of poetry encompassed here as it is to define a poet. We begin with this reminder to extrapolate, to read holistically and associatively. Each poet has provided a poetics statement, although they range widely—from Khadijah Queen’s more traditional explanation of poetic process to Anselm Berrigan’s three-word refusal: “No more poetics.” Some statements read like essays (Andrea Rexilius), some like poems (Evie Shockley). Poetics statements are common for anthologies, and they work well here, as expanders. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Island of a Thousand Mirrors, by Nayomi Munaweera

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St. Martin’s Press

256 pages, $24.99

 

Review by Michelle Newby

 

“Behind the retreating Englishman, on the new nation’s flag is poised a stylized lion, all curving flank and ornate muscle, a long, cruel sword gripped in its front paw. It is the ancient symbol of the Sinhala…A green stripe represents that small and much-tossed Muslim population. An orange stripe represents the larger Tamil minority…But in the decades that are coming, race riots and discrimination will render the orange stripe inadequate. It will be replaced by a new flag. On its face, a snarling tiger, all bared fang and bristling whisker…A rifle toting tiger. A sword gripping lion. This is a war that will be waged between related beasts.”

The politics of the Sri Lankan civil war are rendered not just personal but intimate as the Buddhist Sinhala (the ancestral dominant caste) and Hindu Tamil battle for the island nation in Nayomi Munaweera’s stunning debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Reduced economic circumstances force the Sinhala Ranasinghe family to rent the upper floor of their home to the Tamil Shivalingam family. As conditions in the country deteriorate precipitously and the war invades both families, they are forced to flee the island. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

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argonauts

Graywolf Press

160 pp, $23.00

 

Review by Jacob Spears

 

The unsettled prose in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts reflects the intractability of her concerns in writing about identity, personhood, and how we make relationships with others. The white space that surrounds each paragraph is a return to the fragmentary form she developed in Bluets, which also found Nelson using the intimacy of her life to write about larger cultural ideas. The Argonauts, however, is a more difficult work, interested in expressing concerns about gender and normativity without attempting to situate those concepts through a fixed discourse. Every bit as erudite as her previous book, The Art of Cruelty, though not as magisterial and academic, The Argonauts embarks on a voyage of exploration in which the ship, like the Argo, “designates molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip,” intent on retaining “a sense of the fugitive.”

Though it swells in and out of its address, Argonauts unfolds mostly as a confessional written to the second-person ‘you’ that is her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, who very publicly underwent a transition from female to male through the course of their relationship. “Something about identity,” Nelson quips, “was loose and hot in our house.” As a memoir, Nelson’s account of intimacy is at turns light and disturbing, charming and uncomfortable. What if where I am is what I need? she asks, citing Deborah Hay. “Before you, I always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situations. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.” Argonauts is an attempt to chart this course in which her position and experience—like language—is anchored in the moment of exchange. A place, context, or sentence inevitably shifts understanding, performance, and intention. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] You’re Fine by Gina Tron

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Papercut Press

276 pages, $15

 

Review by Spencer Goyette

 

Gina Tron, regular VICE columnist and no stranger to the darker sides of human behavior, has a voice that deserves listening to. In You’re Fine, her autobiography and first book, Tron leads readers on a twisted path through her own personal history detailing events both humorous and dark with a consistent candidness that is excruciatingly honest and magnetic. Tron’s insight into the world around her is often cut with sarcasm and humor, but it carries a depth as she tries to give meaning to the chaos:

“Sometimes people don’t want to understand how a person has become the way they are, they just demonize their current behavior.”

Tron seeks help from a psychiatric facility after being rejected by friends and family following heavy cocaine use and a brutal rape, yet she quickly finds out that the ward she’s entered into has an atmosphere of extreme apathy and neglect. Patients roll around in various states of drugged-up stupor, some shitting themselves so frequently that they are caked in their own excrement. The staff is brutal and negligent, the doctors are cold and mostly absent. Her personal narrative provides insight into how poor the approach to mental health, addiction, and sexual abuse treatment are in this country. Most of us are not aware of these people or fail to acknowledge their existence altogether, as if ignoring fixes the problem. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

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Hawk

Grove Atlantic

300 pages, $26.00, hardcover

 

Review by Cate Hennessey

 

 

All great books are works of obsession, but Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk grasps obsession with its elegant, terrifying claws and carries it to the wild intersection of loneliness, grief, falconry, and literature.

After her father’s sudden death, MacDonald attempts to assuage her grief by training a young goshawk she names Mabel. Despite her experience training falcons, Macdonald doubts her ability with the goshawk, a notoriously difficult raptor. But in doubt is often where we find ourselves most alive, and Macdonald is no exception. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: What begins with bird, by Noy Holland

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FC2

167 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Brynne Rebele-Henry

 

Noy Holland’s 2005 story collection What begins with bird is a catalogue of conception. The female characters are a host of surrogates charged with the rearing of their own wombs, babies both imaginary and not, and the men are damaged bruisers, temperamental, mentally unstable fathers unaware of their growing broods, lumberjack drop-outs, quick to lose control. Tinged with love and the catatonia and soreness of afterbirth, Holland’s prose forms an ode to the lilt, bulge, hobble, and gilded calamity that is pregnancy, the fallopian galaxy of it, and to the burlesque that is parenthood. Holland frequently uses the garden of fertility as a metaphor— the stunted growth of roots that result in insanity, the barren ovaries of plains and mountains and the hardships of existing in a body—and equates the tangles of birth, abortion and menstruation to winter, when trees strip their own leaves in a form of reincarnation. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox

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Anger
Press 53
124 pages, $14.95
Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

It would be unfair to say I hungered for more emotion in Wendy J. Fox’s Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories, because my very hunger is what the writer meant to evoke. These are, after all, stories of the modern West – a sere place peopled by characters who are just emerging from generations of isolated farm and desert life or who are working desk jobs and living in the now tamed-to-sterility post-Wild-West suburbs. The emotional hollowness and dislocation of Fox’s characters matches their positions in and relationships with this New West.

This collection is Fox’s debut, as well as the inaugural winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. All the stories take place somewhere in the West – some in rural, others in urban settings, mostly in Washington state. Sometimes the characters are young and house-hunting, about to start their families. Sometimes they have fled a life they knew in the rural wasteland and are seeking a new way in an unknown place. Sometimes the characters are in love. Almost all the time, the love is mistaken and breaks. Some of the characters recur, and Fox varies points-of-view, usually between first-person and close-third, though the title story experiments with second person. All the stories hearken to something missing. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots by Katherine Hoerth

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boots

Lamar University Press

116 Pages $15.00 USD

 

Review by Amanda Daria Stoltz

 

Every poem in Katherine Hoerth’s Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots is a fresh gust of wind. In this stunning collection, Hoerth deconstructs the complexity of femininity, and the steep binary that makes feminine beauty both dangerous and powerful, sinful and godly. These poems are effortlessly steeped in nature and mythology, and each is as satisfying as Eve’s first taste of forbidden fruit.

Hoerth teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Texas Pan American, and it’s no mystery why she’s got a chili pepper rating on Ratemyprofessors.com; her poems are spicy hot. Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots is Hoerth’s second collection of poetry, and it keeps its promise to be as sexy (and powerful) as a Goddess wearing cowboy boots. Never have I read poems so encompassing of womanhood. They range from naivety to caution, from shamefulness to exhibition. They are as if Faulkner’s Caddy wrote poetry. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, by Kent Russell

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Alfred A. Knopf

304 pages, $24.95

 

Review by Joseph Demes

 

“I am homesick most,” Kent Russell writes, in I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, “for the place I’ve never known.” Framed by a road trip with his father, from San Francisco to Martins Ferry, Ohio, and a biopic of Daniel Boone, Russell’s essays (which have been featured in n+1, GQ, Harper’s, and The Believer) are imbued with longing for a mythology he has never embodied – and possibly cannot embody. His subjects are pearls excavated from an oceanic high- and low-brow milieu. They include: the “partially deflated . . . most physically unhealthful” fans of Insane Clown Posse (ICP); an entrepreneur peddling a Crusoean retreat for the rich; a man self-immunizing to snake venom, attempting to break records; and Amish teens furiously competing in youth baseball leagues in the throes of Rumspringa (time when they’re allowed to tour the secular world and either reject or commit to their religion).

Russell’s most comfortable and poetic when speaking of sports, especially hockey. While he writes about baseball with awe – of its immaculacy and a necessary ascetic view about stats – hockey is tragic, an entropic system. Gone is the purist view that players must display both technical finesse and vicious pugnacity. Stratified team dynamics are the norm: virtuosic scorers, middling defenders, and golem-like enforcers. Russell resurrects John Brophy: an aged, terminally concussed minor-league enforcer, a casualty of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE): brain damage usually spotlighted in football. Russell won’t allow us to forget Brophy, though; Russell can’t let us shake the past, despite his attempts at divorce. There is pent-up violence and frustration in his prose, a disjunct between his masculinity and a mythology of American maleness. Russell worries that he may be the son his father begrudges, and yet still his patriarch’s rightful inheritor: “I am become Dad, destroyer of beers.” Continue reading →

The Thingbody, by Clare Louise Harmon

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Instar Books

51 pages in PDF form, $10

 

 

Review by Maya Lowy

 

 

Pushcart-nominee Clare Louise Harmon’s debut collection, The Thingbody, is a kind of claustrophobic flipbook, a philosophic, psychotropic memoir. It sears your eyeballs, claws at your fingers, begs to be listened to. Ultimately, the book is more than the sum of its parts. It mosaics into a compelling peek into a burgeoning academic mind.

Forty-one pages of poems (available, for now, only in PDF: in many ways, Thingbody is a book-of-the-future) alternate between neon-bright blocks of color and postmodern blocks of text. If Gertrude Stein and James Joyce had ever had some sick, stuttering baby, it might look a little like Thingbody. Hand-drawn illustrations throughout remind us of the gruesome, homuncular, and yet somehow not indelicate body of this titular thing. “Call me Skinsack for I am the deindividuated,” Thingbody opens. “I am that which seeks violence seeks and lacks ethical privilege of person.” Continue reading →